Re: GNOME and Ohio Linux Fest 2006

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> The
> conference has been been doubling in each year for the past few years -
> so expect over 1000 people this year.

Wow!

> Anyway, I've got two major questions related to this.
>
> 1. I've been looking at the responses for speakers, and I haven't seen
> anyone propose a GNOME talk yet.  The call for speakers closes on July
> 10th.  Is there someone who could give a 30-90 minute talk (in past
> years, most were 45 minutes or so) on GNOME?  I could probably do a
> talk, however I'm not heavily involved in GNOME aside from advocating
> its use, a few patches and bugs, and researching it for my thesis.
> Perhaps someone more official would be better.

http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/GnomeWorldWideHuge.jpg

There are a few people around Ohio (I guess that's the cluster in the
middle of the US?) - I see jamin, jimmy, shaunm, mxpxpod, tremobly,
jcape, I can't really make out the other names.

Perhaps you might invite someone from that list? Alternatively, please
consider speaking yourself - we don't have many GNOME people who
actually give presentations, and the more the merrier (and there are
many examples of why hackers should never give presentations, and people
not heavily involved (except for advocating its use) are better at it ;-)

> 2. Is it possible to do a GNOME table at the Ohio Linux Fest?

Yes! Please!

> Are there
> supplies that the foundation has for this sort of thing?

We have (or should have by then) a US event box, with a couple of
computers, a big GNOME backdrop, and some basic stuff like that. It will
be something of a storage box for conference experience - at each
conference, I'd like to see the organisers add something to the box -
hand-outs they printed, or some livecds for the next guys, or some
posters they got done in Kinkos. In any case, the event box is the bare
minimum so as not to be embarrassing. Some print work will need to be
done alongside (but the foundation can probably reimburse you for that).

The procedure for the box is pretty simple - you need to provide a
drop-off point and a date, we get the box delivered, and afterwards you
have to get it collected and delivered back to the foundation, or on to
the next conference. For the moment, we haven't formalised anything on
travel costs.

> In the past I
> remember messages from Murray Cumming about a conference box for
> Europeans, do we have anything for those of us in North America?  Are
> there rules about making it an official GNOME booth or something like
> that?

No rules - although I would like to have a guide, a kind of cheat sheet
(Paul Cooper's going to be getting examples of this kind of thing from
Greenpeace and Amnesty for us to show us how it's done, and we need to
collect experiences in the wiki about this).

> I think this is a great opportunity to bring in new folks.  Last year
> there was certainly a desire among attendees for more community based
> stuff (too many talks from HP/Novell/etc about blue sky technologies) -
> a prime opportunity to recruit volunteers.  Also, many attendees don't
> use Linux on the desktop, so this could be a great opportunity to share
> the state of the GNOME desktop with them.

Yes, definitely! Go forth and multiply! Anything you need, mail me, the
board or the marketing list, and we'll try to help you out. And tell us
about it please (photos, good & bad points, talking points you use, etc).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
David Neary
bolsh gimp org